“Be it unto me according to thy word”
Mary’s response to God at the Annunciation informs our learning about the Resurrection, too. The actual feast day of the Annunciation more often than not coincides with Lent and Passiontide but occasionally, the 25th of March can be Easter Day itself and whenever that happens or when the Annunciation coincides with days of Holy Week, the commemoration is transferred to Eastertide. There is a wonderful sense in which Mary’s word belongs to the lessons of the Resurrection, especially when it is the Risen Christ who teaches the most and most clearly about the Resurrection.
One of the most powerful lessons about the Resurrection appears in the Gospel for Easter Monday. It is Luke’s marvelous account of the events on the Road to Emmaus. It is an extraordinary scene and one which ultimately focusses on the interpretation of the Scriptures and even more poignantly on the complementariety of the Word spoken and explained and the Word enacted and performed. It is Christ who teaches. Christ is the exegete of the Scriptures of the Old Testament that reveal the meaning of his Passion and Resurrection. We are opened out to a new and radical understanding of our life with God in Jesus Christ.
The Risen Christ runs out after the disciples who are fleeing from Jerusalem in fear, their hopes and expectations having been utterly destroyed by Christ’s crucifixion and death. They had “trusted that it had been he which should have redeemed Israel,” they say. Such words say a lot about their expectations and their understanding of the nature of redemption. Christ is the redeemer of the world, the redeemer of Israel in a new and radically transforming way, not in a political or social way, but spiritually and theologically. There is a radical transformation of the understanding of redemption. It can no longer be confined to the hopes and expectations of politics and power.
Christ runs out after the disciples and engages them in conversation without their awareness of who he is. This seems, perhaps, strange to us but in their minds he is dead and gone. They don’t recognize him at first. After all, they aren’t expecting him. What will it take for us to know the Christ in our midst? It seems to me we often don’t recognize Christ in one another, let alone Christ in ourselves. And what will it take for us to learn the Resurrection? Only the opening of our minds through the opening of the Scriptures, it seems, and through the Word in action, too, it seems.
Christ first draws out of the disciples their expectations and their account of what has happened in the dark days of the Passover and the strange claim of “the women of our company” that “they found not his body” in the sepulcher. There is this general sense of bewilderment and confusion, of anxiety and despair. They literally don’t know what to make of the events of the past several days.
It is at this point that Jesus says to them, “Foolish ones, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken: ought not Christ to have suffered these things, and to enter into his glory?” An arresting and convicting statement, it is the entrée into his “expound[ing] unto them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself.” The Greek word which Luke uses here is an intensified version of the verb which means to interpret or to explain or even to translate. It is the origin of the word, hermeneutics. It is a key point of the story. The Resurrection has to be interpreted and explained. Here the messenger of the Resurrection is the Risen Christ himself through the means of conversation and dialogue, through the means of teaching. And the teaching is all about the word written, the Scriptures. Jesus is providing a way for them to make sense of the events in Jerusalem, speaking to their minds and their hearts.
And yet, the full import of what he is saying is not established in their hearts and minds except through the word in action, we might say. “He took bread and blessed it, and brake, and gave to them.” Only at this point, Luke tells us, “their eyes were opened, and they knew him.” “He was known of them in the breaking of the bread,” a simple yet profound act which takes us back to the Upper Room on the night of his betrayal.
It is a marvelous anagnorisis, ‘a moment of recognition’, for the disciples and it leads to a complete turnaround, a peripeteia, ‘a reversal or change in their situation’. Classic drama, we might say, almost equal to the aesthetic perfection of Greek drama. The moment is wonderfully captured by Luke. First, Jesus “vanished out of their sight”; there is, to be sure, something of the quality of mystery about the Resurrection. However much it engages our world and our hearts and minds, it must by definition be something more and beyond. It is the second thing that shows us the meaning of the Resurrection on hearts and minds.
“They said to one to another, Did not our heart burn within us, while he talked with us by the way, and while he opened to us the Scriptures?” They were undergoing a change of heart and mind, a change through Christ’s presence and through his word. The action of the breaking of the bread crystallizes the moment and clarifies its meaning. They are not only changed but know that something has changed in them through this encounter which touches hearts and minds.
“Did not our heart burn within us?” It is a telling statement and, dare I say, a kind of indictment of our own day. Do our hearts burn within us at hearing God’s word and in Christ’s presence with us sacramentally? And yet, that is what Luke shows us. He shows us the change that the Resurrection makes in ordinary souls. The change is not just about a warm, fuzzy feeling. Their whole outlook has changed. “They rose up the same hour, and returned to Jerusalem.” They are no longer afraid. They return with a spirit of confidence and with a sense of mission. They report what has been made known to them.
Such is the Resurrection. And it happens through the opening out of the Scriptures and through our openness to God’s presence with us in our journey. It is precisely about that quality of soul exemplified in Mary and captured in her word, “be it unto me according to thy word.” Christ here explains and interprets and provides a hermeneutic to understand the radical nature of the Resurrection. It is all, we might say, “according to thy word,” the word explained and interpreted, and the word that gives himself to us in the breaking of the bread.
May our hearts burn within us in the joy of Christ’s Resurrection and in his presence with us.
“Be it unto me according to thy word”
Fr. David Curry
Easter Monday, 2012